When the child is being fed, over time they associate the person providing the food with the food. When the attachment has been learned, the child gains pleasure when the feeder is present without the food. This association between the feeder and a sense of pleasure is the attachment bond. Pavlov ( 1927) suggested that the salivation was a learned response. The dogs were responding to the sight of the research assistants' white lab coats, which the animals had come to associate with the presentation of food.
He noticed that the dog began to salivate when someone entered the room with a bowl of food, but before the dog had eaten the food. Since salivation is a reflex response, this seemed unusual. Pavlov decided that the dog was salivating because it had learned to associate the person with food. He then developed a theory. Food automatically led to the salivation response, since this response had not been learned, he called this an unconditioned response, which is a response that regularly occurs when an unconditioned stimulus is presented.
This was due to reflexes that originate from the cerebral cortex of the brain. This makes classical conditioning a taught behavior which moves on to being a reflex after time so that you do it without thought. With classic conditioning there are unconditioned responses, conditioned stimulus, and a conditioned response. With unconditioned responses this is something that happens naturally like getting hungry when you smell food. For conditioned stimulus this would be viewed as a neutral stimulus that after time has become associated with an unconditioned stimulus.
Pavlov landed upon this theory by mistake whilst carrying out a different unrelated experiment with dogs. Nevertheless, he used this as an added advantage and modified his experiment with the dogs to prove his newly founded theory. Initially the dogs would salivate (unconditional response) when presented with food (neutral stimulus) and no response were obtained from the animals when presented with food (unconditional stimulus) were sounded on its own. For a period of time thereafter, the bell was sounded at the same time when the food was presented to the dogs. Eventually, the sound of the bell (now a conditioned response) was sufficient to make the dogs salivate (now conditioned response) in the absent of food.
The scenario will be explained and a chart will be complied that will demonstrate how classical conditioning applies to this scenario. Classical Conditioning Theory Ivan Petrovich Pavlov is the founder of the classical conditioning theory. Pavlov, a Russian psychologist was studying the secretion of stomach acids and salivation of dogs when they were presented with different kinds and different amounts of food (Feldman, 2010). While doing so, Pavlov noticed that the amount of salivation would often increase when the dogs had not eaten any food. The mere presence of the person who supplied the food or the footsteps of that person would stimulate the dogs and more stomach acid would be produced (Feldman, 2010).
Operant conditioning suggests that being fed satisfies an infant’s hunger, ultimately making them feel comfortable again. This is called rewarding and the infant learns that the food is a reward. The person who supplies the food is associated with the food and becomes a secondary reinforce. The infant then seeks to be with this person because they know that they will be rewarded. However, we cannot generalise the findings of this theory to humans because the evidence is based largely on animals - humans behave completely differently to animals.
Two important learning theories proposed by the behaviourist approach are operant conditioning and classical conditioning. Classical conditioning you learn to associate two stimuli when they occur together, such that the response originally generated by one stimulus which is transferred to another. The person learns to produce an existing response to a new stimulus. For example, Little Albert (Watson & Rayner1920) was conditioned to respond with anxiety to the stimulus of a white rat. This was achieved by pairing the rat with a loud noise that already made Albert anxious.
Contact is normally achieved by imagining scenarios (covert desensitisation), but sometimes involves actual contact (in vivo desensitisation). Snake phobics may begin SD treatment by looking at a picture of snakes in a sealed tank, and progressively work through to actually holding one. There has been a lot of research into behavioural therapies. Jones (1924) used SD to eradicate ‘Little Peters’s’ phobia of white fluffy animals and objects such as rabbits and cotton wool. The rabbit was presented to the patient at closer distances each time his anxiety levels subsided to permit movement to the next stage, and Peter was rewarded with food to develop a positive association towards the rabbit.
Feared stimuli are conditioned through therapy to be associated with relaxation. This will lead to extinction of the fear response Systematic desensitisation was first developed by Wolpe (1958) and is used in the treatment of phobias which was based on the experiment of Little Albert who had a phobia of white rats which generalised to all furry white objects. This therapy aims to extinguish a phobia by eradicating an undesirable behaviour (fear) and replacing it with a more desirable one (relaxation). The aim of systematic desensitisation is to decondition or desensitise the patient to each items on the hierarchy systematically and to achieve this, the client must be able to remain relaxed when confronted with the top of the hierarchy. Systematic desensitisation is used to treat phobias which are irrational or exaggerated and can have an affect on an individual’s daily life.
Learning theory is the explanation of attachment. Dollard and Miller (1950) say that attachment is learned behaviour that is picked up though classical and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning is to do with association. Food is an unconditioned stimulus and pleasure received by a baby is the unconditioned response. Without association the caregiver is a neutral stimulus, however once the baby associates the caregiver with food they become a conditioned stimulus with a conditioned response.